Kyle City Limits
by BRENDA STEWART
It’s taken me three weeks to cull this column down into something that is even plausibly printable. I’ve been gnashing my teeth. Tossing and turning. Trying to make sense of this whole State Board of Education debacle which is garnering international headlines as well as making Texas the butt of punch lines from coast to coast these days. Worse, it’s threatening my children’s education.
From what I’ve gleaned, in January and in March the Texas Board of Education Titanic-ed a year’s worth of work by teachers, scholars and other curriculum writers in uninformed and tyrannical changes based on their their personal, religious beliefs. They shunned historians, economists, sociologists and even classroom teachers, as reference and resource, as they rewrote the curriculum standards to fit their oddly construed version of reality. To add insult to injury, last year they made catastrophic changes to the science curriculum as well, questioning the validity of evolution and our influence on global climate change. Fundamentalist Christians on the board pushed through creationist and intelligent-design curriculum over scientifically proven standards. And somehow, this flew under our radar?
Scary enough, but get this: Next week, this same board is slated to vote on social studies curriculum which includes:
The idea that although the term “democratic” simply means social equality, our form of government should be referred to as a “constitutional republic” for some odd reason.
The proposal that Thomas Jefferson be removed entirely from the discussion on the Enlightenment and that Italian Thomas Aquinas (who graced this planet in the 1200s and left us with these jewels; “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.” And, “How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God.”) should serve in his place.
Vague Christian “influences” on the nation’s Founding Fathers, but without the stabilizing ballast of the separation of church and state. The board is refusing to teach students that the folks who wrote our Constitution actually worked to protect religious freedom by forbidding government from promoting or condemning any religion over another.
Heralding the unquestionably biased Heritage Foundation, the shrieking Phyllis Schlafy, and Jerry Falwell’s (“If you’re not a born-again Christian then you are a failure as a human being.”) Moral Majority as heros and icons of American liberty.
McCarthyism as a defensible and actually justifiable piece of our history. I’m sorry, I just can’t add to that. It makes my mind reel.
The concept that the struggle for equal and civil rights was somehow overplayed in traditional history. And, get this, that we should actually be thankful to those generous white men who were so gracious in extending our civil liberties to us (even as the courts threatened sanctions). I am not kidding. I wish I was.
Luckily, some folks were actually paying attention out there because at least three out of five of the fanatical right bloc will not be coming back when the new board convenes in January when Don McLeroy, Cynthia Dunbar and Randy Rives take their long awaited leave. McLeroy just last week stated that he “loved” science (winkwink, pokepoke), and Dunbar prayed before a national audience in Washington that God would “invade” our schools and homes and country and churches (I’m assuming that she’s speaking of her “god” because if she was invoking Allah, I betcha there would be hell to pay on all kinds of levels if he were invading anything in America), and Rives who, as a school board trustee, rammed through his abstinence-only sex ed agenda into a district that has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the state. I could not make this stuff up.
In one ray of sunshine, future Governor (if there is a God, like all these folks are professing) Bill White, in his renowned rationality, suggests that the SBOE wait to vote on the Social Studies curriculum until the newly elected members of the board are firmly in place. Now that the primaries are over and the general election is just over the horizon, he proposes a delay of the ludicrous May vote until January 2011. The voters of Texas spoke resoundingly at the polls and will continue to do so in November.
There’s a rally at the Texas Education Agency in Austin next Wednesday, May 19 at 1 p.m. to give us all an opportunity to stand up to this extremism and implore that these decisions be postponed until sanity prevails on the board. Take a late lunch and make your voice heard. Even if you don’t have kiddos of your own, the children being educated today will be tomorrow’s doctors and lawyers and architects and educators. It affects you. Now’s the time to pay attention.
I think it makes sense. The voters don’t want these three making any decisions which will affect the school children of Texas. We have spoken loudly and clearly. Let’s let these three fade quietly into this good night. And pray like hell that the board we elect in November will have sense and rationality and a fervent passion for the truth. And act accordingly.
